Monday, 7 November 2011

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'...

'Stolen Car', charcoal and pastel on paper, A2 size

This third drawing in charcoal above, reminded me of some of my original creative motivations behind these nocturnal images of the motorways around West Bromwich. The huge swathes of black shapes from the motorway structure itself and the dark large shadows reminded me of the paintings of Abstract Expressionist painters, Franz Kline and Pierres Soulages. I really like Kline’s energetic, yet spare, work and the reduction in them down to just using black and white paint. Soulages paintings are much denser and heavily worked but have a mysteriousness to them I like. I thought that the motorways had a similar quality worth exploring. Yet when I did visit them again with more creative ideas in mind, I was struck by the amount of colour actually in the scenes, so this seed of an idea of them being perhaps a riff on Kline’s paintings never grew any further.

Franz Kline

Pierres Soulages

Now making these black and white drawings Kline and Soulages have entered my thoughts again as I think about how to develop them into paintings.